“Motherhood can be deeply fulfilling, and few would argue that family life is unimportant. Yet authoritarian movements have long politicized it, reframing it as women’s sole purpose and a substitute for autonomy and rights,” Adrienne Matei observes in the Guardian. Welcome to the “womanosphere” — also called the “femosphere.”

According to Matei, “the womanosphere is an informal web of online creators who rally around normative femininity. Its idea of womanhood is informed by anti-queerness, white supremacy, fundamentalist Christianity and traditional maternalism. It also maps on to the extreme, discriminatory agenda of Project 2025, which aims to roll back historical victories of the women’s movement such as workplace equality, education and healthcare.”

That framing echoes the role that women were encouraged to play in Nazi Germany. In her piece titled “From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: why strongmen rely on women at home,” Matei cites historian Claudia Koonz, a professor emerita of history at Duke University, who notes that in Hitler’s Germany. “There was a whole array of women’s magazines that glorified housewives. It would be the equivalent of social media today” shaping norms from the kitchen table outward.

Matei points out that “Koonz is well-acquainted with the ways political strongmen rely on women’s labor at the family level to implement state ideology. Her 1986 book, Mothers in the Fatherland, describes how the ordinary women of Nazi Germany ‘operated at its very center,’ incubating ideals of white supremacy, female subordination and sacrifice at home.”

Conservative evangelical Christians in the U.S. have long insisted women should be subservient to husbands, confined to the home, raising sons to embody masculine ideals. Matei notes that “The idea that women’s bodies are state resources for sustaining population appears to be re-emerging; the Trump administration is encouraging traditional roles by rolling back workplace equity, restricting reproductive rights and policing gender identity.”

The parallels are unmistakable. In March 1933, just weeks after Hitler took power, Joseph Goebbels gave a speech titled “German Women,” at the opening of a women’s exhibition in Berlin. Goebbels was proud to be giving his first speech to women after taking charge of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. A woman’s “most glorious duty is to give children to her people and nation, children who can continue the line of generations and who guarantee the immortality of the nation,” Goebbels, told the audience  of women.

Paula White of Trump’s Faith Adviser, White House Faith Office, has plainly stated that the head of her household is her husband Jonathan Cain. “If there’s ever a time that a decision has to be made and we don’t agree on something, he’s the head.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), which affirms complementarian theology: married women are to submit to their husbands; women cannot hold church leadership positions.

Here are a few excerpts from Goebbels’ 1933 speech:

We do not see the woman as inferior, but rather as having a different mission, a different value, than that of the man. Therefore we believed that the German woman, who more than any other in the world is a woman in the best sense of the word, should use her strength and abilities in other areas than the man.

The woman in public life today is no different than the women of the past. No one who understands the modern age would have the crazy idea of driving women from public life, from work, profession, and breadwinning. But it must also be said that those things that belong to the man must remain his. That includes politics and the military. That is not to disparage women, only a recognition of how she can best use her talents and abilities.

Looking back over the past years of Germany’s decline, we come to the frightening, nearly terrifying, conclusion that the less German men were willing to act as men in public life, the more women succumbed to the temptation to fill the role of the man. The feminization of men always leads to the masculinization of women. An age in which all great idea of virtue, of steadfastness, of hardness, and determination have been forgotten should not be surprised that the man gradually loses his leading role in life and politics and government to the woman.

The best place for the woman to serve her people is in her marriage, in the family, in motherhood. This is her highest mission. That does not mean that those women who are employed or who have no children have no role in the motherhood of the German people. They use their strength, their abilities, their sense of responsibility for the nation, in other ways. We are convinced, however, that the first task of a socially reformed nation must be to again give the woman the possibility to fulfill her real task, her mission in the family and as a mother.

Matei writes that “the Trump administration touts pronatalist rewards, such as a $1000 government-funded investment account for new babies, and has discussed others, including a ‘National Medal of Motherhood’ for women with six children. While vice-president JD Vance cried: ‘I want more babies in the United States of America’ at an anti-abortion rally in early 2025, Republicans in Congress plotted eliminating federal tax credits for daycare and other supports that enable women’s workforce participation – an effort to control women’s social roles.

“The administration’s policies suggest its goal is not only population growth but specifically more white births. By rolling back reproductive rights more drastically than at any point in the last 50 years, the Trump administration has set the stage for worsening maternal mortality – especially for Black women, who die in childbirth at nearly three-and-a-half times the rate of white women. It has also demonstrated hostility to people of color, tearing immigrant families apart, curtailing immigrant  and ordering an end to birthright citizenship.

From Goebbels’ glorification of motherhood to today’s evangelical calls for female submission, authoritarian leaders return again and again to the domestic sphere, treating women’s bodies as resources of the state.

The post From Goebbels to Trump’s Christian Nationalists: Glorifying Motherhood, Promoting Female Submission first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.